Rod Liddle says that the battle over the Islamic cultural centre mirrors the tortuous debate we’ve all endured for nearly a decade
Like you, I suspect, I am hugely enjoying the debate as to whether or not a huge Islamic cultural centre and prayer room should be built 100 yards or so from Ground Zero in New York — where, fittingly, Islam made perhaps its most iconic and vibrant cultural statement of the present century. For many of those who lost husbands, wives, friends and colleagues in the 9/11 attacks, the plan for a mosque seems to be — you know — just pushing it a little bit: a little test to the old tolerance and patience. I suppose it must seem akin to opening a National Socialist Cultural Centre near the front door of Ravensbruck, or Dachau, where you could browse through the economic teachings of Julius Streicher and maybe hum the ‘Horst Wessel’ to yourself. The Holocaust was effected through untrammelled human wickedness, of course; a system of thought by itself cannot actually carry out genocide, merely prescribe it as being a bloody good idea, all things considered. National Socialism in Germany was the means of justifying those acts of human wickedness and of acquiring compliance from the weak-willed.
Islam is not so hideous an ideology as National Socialism, but there is not the remotest doubt that its illiberal and authoritarian tendencies, its apparent vindictiveness towards unbelievers and especially Jews, its loathing of international capitalism and so on, was the philosophical foundation upon which the 9/11 murderers set about their task. In a sense, the ever more fractious debate in New York about whether the ‘mosque’ should be built, with the left broadly in favour and the right broadly against, is a mirror of the strange and distorted debate we have had here for the last ten years or so. The British left, until comparatively recently, has sought to exculpate Islam, to somehow detach it from the appalling deeds carried out in its name, even to the point of denying that those deeds were carried out in its name.
For example, those Tube attacks in London on 7 July 2005 were ‘nothing to do with Islam’, according to that Koranic expert Sir Ian Blair, then the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. Well, with respect, Sir Ian, the people who actually did the bombings begged to differ, as they were kind enough to explain in those fatuous videos they recorded before they went out to buy their last ever Oyster cards. Tony Blair held a similar view, cheerfully pronouncing that Islam was a peaceable religion and did not for a moment countenance terrorism. I haven’t a clue who told him that, but I assume that they had their fingers crossed tightly behind their backs.
But by and large, this was the view of the left — despite the fact that Islam is a patently right-wing ideology. If a non-Muslim were to articulate the sort of views about, for example, the chastisement of uppity women, or the undesirability of homosexuality, which are the staple of even that chimeric beast ‘moderate’ Islam, then the left would be screaming for their head on a plate. But utter the word ‘Islam’ and all bets are off. The ideology must always be exculpated — presumably because it is the ideology of primarily ethnic minorities, to which the left always affixes its support, no matter what the moral case might be.
And so, as a consequence, we found ourselves saddled with an act of parliament which insisted that we should respect Islam, a wholly fatuous piece of legislation imposed upon us by a government which may well have wished to curry favour with a Muslim constituency which had fled from the Labour fold in understandable disgust at our involvement in Iraq, but also because ministers seemed to believe that the ideology of Islam was something it was not. That it was perfectly valid and decent as a belief system and its ideology easily assimilable with our own.
Only a minority of British Muslims felt ‘sympathy’ for the bombers of 2005 — something in the region of 20 per cent. And that sympathy did not extend to approving of their actions — almost all British Muslims believed that the bombers had been ‘wrong’ (ICM poll, 2006). I do not know how many British Muslims believe that homosexuality is wrong, or not merely wrong but deserving of the death sentence. The British Muslims I know personally are among the most decent, liberal and thoughtful people I have ever met, and I am implacably opposed to the victimisation of those British Muslims who have found themselves suddenly marooned under the description ‘bad Islam’ and subjected to state harassment and the possible proscribing of their organisations. Further, ‘bad Islam’ is an ever-expanding derogation; once it meant simply whacko terrorists, suicide bombers and the like. These days it seems to include all Muslim women who wear burkas. The irony is that this anti-Muslim nastiness is a direct consequence of official exculpation of the ideology. Wrath is visited upon the singer, rather than the song. But it is the song which is the problem.
Mind you, everything I’ve written above is utterly irrelevant if it was not Muslims, after all, who carried out those attacks upon the Twin Towers in 2001. It might well have been the CIA, or even those pesky Jews once again. I mean, I suspect it was Arab Muslims, but that is not the view of the majority of Muslims in the USA. They think it was nothing to do with al-Qa’eda, nothing to do with Arabs, but more likely one of those two other offices I mentioned in the previous sentence. This somewhat disheartening fact comes from a 2006 Pew Research Centre study into Muslim attitudes throughout the world and the attitudes of those whom they live among. (By the way, our Muslims, the study suggested, faced the least hostility of any European country and yet were by far the most antithetical to the Western way of life.) The Pew study discovered that there was not a single Muslim country in the world where the majority of the population was able to accept that the 9/11 terrorists were Muslim, Arabic or anything other than part of the George W. Bush CIA-filthy Jew alliance. There is epic delusion on every side, in other words.
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